By MICHAEL BRICK

Published: September 3, 2005

One possibility is that Walt Whitman would be proud. A newspaper-shaped thing has taken the name The Brooklyn Standard in homage to the paper that published Whitman's Brooklyniana series in the 1860's, and people are eager to see the next issue.

This newspaper-shaped thing is focused on Brooklyn, printing the word Brooklyn 17 times on its front page, a display of loyalty stronger than Whitman himself showed with lines like ''Manhattan faces and eyes forever for me.''And its content is divisive in a way Whitman might recognize from feuds with bosses at The Brooklyn Eagle over his Free Soil Party views. But while Whitman was taking a stand against the expansion of slavery, the editors of the new Standard have embraced more self-serving causes.

The publication is paid for by Forest City Ratner, the company promoting a proposed $3.5 billion arena project for downtown Brooklyn, and most of the articles, well, promote a proposed $3.5 billion arena project for downtown Brooklyn.

To counter the impression that it is trying to fool anyone, The Standard avoids calling itself a newspaper, instead proclaiming itself ''a Forest City Ratner Publication.''

Efforts at transparency end there. The Standard is printed on newsprint, folded like a tabloid, laid out to look like a newspaper and distributed alongside real newspapers. Hawkers hand it out by subway stations, and its masthead is full of people with newspaper-sounding jobs like executive editor and photographer.

Articles by writers of obvious bias are consigned to pages marked Editorial and Op-Ed. In that space, an article in the first issue was signed by Bruce Ratner, namesake of the development company behind the arena project, known as Atlantic Yards. Another article was about him. In it, the Rev. Herbert Daughtry described a talk Mr. Ratner gave to schoolchildren and said Mr. Ratner was ''relaxed, smiling and seated on a child's chair, in his customary humble, winsome manner.''

The first issue also published letters to the editor from politicians who have endorsed the arena project, including Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Marty Markowitz, the borough president. Both men enlivened their prose with exclamation points. Mr. Markowitz used three.

If The Standard were a real newspaper, a writer named Edward-Isaac Dovere would be its young, indefatigable reporter desperate for the soothing paternal approval of the front page (and generally despised by the other reporters; names could be named here, but won't). Mr. Dovere scored two front-page bylines in the debut issue by staying focused on stories promoting a certain $3.5 billion arena project for downtown Brooklyn.

The Standard's goals have been no great mystery to opponents of the arena project. The authors of No Land Grab, a Web site with an unmistakably forthright name, wrote last month that ''it has become fashionable for Brooklynites to use The Brooklyn Standard to line their hamster cages and use as 'brown matter' for composting bins.''

Other arena opponents consider The Standard a valuable resource. Patti Hagan, a leader of the Prospect Heights Action Coalition, said she saw a young man hawking the paper this month and ran toward him, only to find that he had the old issue. This was a disappointment. Ms. Hagan already has that one. If you call her, she can read aloud from a copy she keeps on her desk.

''I keep it right in front of me because I need to refer to it, and I've underlined it and I've memorized it; I've got total recall of this thing,'' Ms. Hagan said. ''Every time they put something like this out, you learn more.''

Ms. Hagan said she awaited the next issue ''with bated breath.''

Some fear she will be disappointed. Daniel Goldstein, another opponent of the arena project, said he did not expect a second edition.

''Their intention was to advertise their project,'' Mr. Goldstein said. ''They're not in the newspaper business.''

Still, there is talk of the next issue: The directors of an arts group called Rooftop Films wrote and publicized a letter rebuffing overtures from the development group to appear in The Standard. This turn of events seemed a setback for The Standard, but it worked out well for the film group.

Rooftop Films' audience mirrors a mix of professionals and hipsters who present the vocal opposition to the arena project, and news of the group's rejection of The Standard made the front page of the local weekly, The Brooklyn Papers, last month.Joseph DePlasco, a spokesman for Forest City Ratner, which is the development partner of The New York Times Company for its new headquarters building, said a new issue of The Standard would be published in September. He said readers could expect more overviews of the project, letters from supporters and dates of future hearings.

''We'll still try to do it in a colorful, hopefully engaging way,'' Mr. DePlasco said, adding that the publication is meant to complement the developer's other efforts to promote the arena project.

How proud Whitman would be is an open question.

Though the new Standard invokes the legacy of the old Brooklyn Standard and the subsequent Brooklyn Standard Union, Mr. DePlasco said it ''would be presumptuous of us to suggest what Whitman would have thought.''

As the dispute between the arena's supporters and opponents amounts in some ways to a clash between low-rise brownstones and large-scale public works, Whitman himself gave a hint of his views right in the pages of Brooklyniana.

''Several of the churches are noble buildings, and the new Academy of Music is a sufficient success in an architectural point of view outside,'' Whitman wrote. ''But, after all, there are private rows of buildings in some of the choice streets of our city that transcend any single public edifice among us that we know of.''

Photos: Damon Meadows, above, handing out The Brooklyn Standard at a newsstand, in a photograph taken by Patti Hagan, left, an opponent of a proposed $3.5 billion arena project in downtown Brooklyn. Ms. Hagan looks forward to the next edition of the paper so she can learn more about the project. (Photo by Ting-Li Wang/The New York Times)